


go ahead, go ahead.

by lescalier



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, i just love writing sad old men basically, sad old men and incongruously happy dogs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-05
Updated: 2013-08-05
Packaged: 2017-12-22 12:56:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/913462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lescalier/pseuds/lescalier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Herc wakes up in the night, some time after Chuck and Stacker help to seal the Rift, finds Max gone, and goes to look for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	go ahead, go ahead.

Herc wakes up at some god awful hour of the morning and Max is gone. Not gone, gone. He’s pretty sure the damned thing doesn’t have it in him to actually run off. But the familiar weight of Max sleeping on his feet is absent, the heavy warmth of a bulldog grown too fat in the last few months with all the sympathy treats Herc and Mako keep feeding him. Herc rolls onto his back and stares in the blackness at the ceiling of his small room. He knows exactly where Max is.

Age hits him as it has always hit him in the early hours. Creaking knees and muscles that ache deep in the back of his ribs, minor grievances he could hide with morning coffee and a run on the track, pitiable nuisances in the vast and overwhelming weakness that was his son surpassing him. Sometimes his arm still aches where the bone snapped the day Eureka shut down in Causeway Bay; he wonders, dimly, like hearing a knocking in a far off room—how quickly would Chuck have healed from that hit?

The path from officers’ quarters to the pilots’ is one he knows well. It doesn’t take long to reach the hall where his son’s room lies quiet and silent, left uninhabited out of respect (though since the sealing of the Rift, there hasn’t been a high demand for Jaeger pilots anyway). His steps echo across corrugated steel; sepia-colored lights in cages glare from the walls. When he turns the corner to Chuck’s room, he hears Max panting and rustling cheerfully, and a familiar voice cooing at him.

“ _Good boy, who’s a good boy_ ," Mako says quietly in Japanese that Herc just barely makes out. He’s never been very good at it. She looks up just as he comes into view and half-rises immediately, her hand still at Max’s collar as he plops himself down on top of her boot, panting happily. “Marshal," she says, dipping her head.

Herc bobs his neck in reply. "Didn’t come scratching at your door, did he?"

Mako shakes her head. “No, not at all. He’s very well behaved, most of the time."

“‘Most of the time’?"

She folds her lips together in a way he knows well, from years of watching her quietly respect Pentecost’s wishes. He supposes he’ll see a lot more of that look now that he has the stripes on his coat. "He was whining for a little while, outside—outside Chuck’s door. I can hear him from my room," she explains quietly, gesturing over her shoulder. Her door is just two down. Herc half-expects Raleigh to poke his head out from the one across the way; lord knows the boy doesn’t sleep.

"Good hearing," he says instead, taking a knee. “C’mere, boy."

Max looks at him with his tongue lolling out, stands up, and then looks back up at Mako. He crushes himself against her leg desperately and begins to whine, and Herc feels something popping inside him, like a thousand strings are being slashed through, a thousand cords that held down his heart and his lungs, and now they’re rising too quickly, rushing into his throat—he’s getting the bends from his own goddamn insides. He swallows hard. Part of him wants to snatch the dog, all 53 pounds of it, up into his arms. Part of him wants to walk out of that hallway and lock his door behind him. If the dumb dog wants Stacker’s girl over him, fine. _But it’s his goddamn dog._

He looks up and he knows something is wrong with his face. He’s let something slip. Mako’s eyes are wide and her hand is frozen in the air above Max’s head, her other held so stiffly in her pocket that her elbow has winged out from her side, an awkward rictus of embarrassment for both of them, each bone in her body as uncomfortable as Herc is. He tries to smooth his face. She looks away. 

"I apologize," she says when he rises. "I was on my way to bring him back to your room, actually."

Herc waves her off. "Take your time. He’s fond of you. And he keeps runnin’ off at 3 a.m. to yowl at—" he gestures at the steel door that hasn’t been opened in months, EUREKA 01 tattooed to its front. 

Mako smiles down at Max and gives his ears another rub. "I think you misunderstand," she says, coloring at her ears and cheeks. She pulls her other hand out of her pocket and sheepishly opens her long white fingers. In her palm are a handful of meaty bone-shaped dog treats. Max immediately perks up and barks once, shuffling even closer to her legs.

Herc hears himself laughing long after he starts. The heart and the lungs in his throat rattle like old coins in a deep, deep well. He feels so old, all over, and his laughter sounds like someone else’s, some other man who stepped into shoes too large for him, into a cockpit he didn’t quite fit, into a family that never quite suited. He can almost hear Chuck barging out of his room, his eyes and mouth drawn in deep slashes across his too-young face, hollering to _shut the fuck up, you fuckin’ idiots, a pilot’s gotta rest!_ His skin wants to pull itself from his skull. When was the last time he laughed? He puts his hand to his face to hold it in place, as if it weren’t sinews and tissue securing it to his bone, but a child’s glue stick, haphazardly pinning salvaged bits of paper and cloth to cardstock in the last Father’s Day gift his son ever gave him, long, long before he was dead. If he pulled his face away now, he’s not sure it would be his at all.

Something nudges his calf. He looks down and Max is winding his waddling path between Herc’s legs, forming a lazy figure eight until he settles comfortably on the ground at Herc’s feet, and immediately rolls onto his back, his belly exposed, twisting this way and that until Herc gets the message. Herc rubs at one eye and bends down to rake his fingers over Max’s stomach; the dog pants and shakes his leg in relief. 

"Thanks for keeping him in one place," he says, looking up at Mako, who has remained silent and still this whole time. He wonders dimly how long he was standing there, how long he let this sea of weakness overcome him, this old man caught in the empty drift of the air on his own. Her hands are folded at her waist. She smiles the way people smile when they have been holding onto their own grief so long, it becomes easy to see it in others. A quirk of her mouth; a light of understanding in her dark eyes. She bows again, a fraction deeper this time.

"Good night, Marshal," she says, and turns back towards her room.

"Good night, Mori," he says. Her door closes and locks with the cranking of gears, and Herc turns around, tapping his thigh. Max only waits as long as it takes to right himself to follow.


End file.
